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posted by martyb on Tuesday January 20 2015, @09:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the missing-Logic-7 dept.

Jean-Louis Gassée writes in Monday Note that the painful gestation of OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) with its damaged iWork apps, the chaotic iOS 8 launch, iCloud glitches, and the trouble with Continuity, have raised concerns about the quality of Apple software. “It Just Works”, the company’s pleasant-sounding motto, has became an easy target, giving rise to jibes of “it just needs more work”.

"I suspect the rapid decline of Apple’s software is a sign that marketing is too high a priority at Apple today," writes Marco Arment. "having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality." Many issues revolve around the general reliability of OS X.

"With Yosemite, I typically have to reboot my laptop at least once a day, and my desktop every few days of use," writes Glenn Fleishman. "The point of owning a Mac is to not have to reboot it regularly. There have been times in the past between OS X updates where I've gone weeks to months without a restart."

I know what I hope for concludes Gassée. "I don’t expect perfection, I’ve lived inside several sausage factories and remember the smell. If Apple were to spend a year concentrating on solid fixes rather than releasing software that’s pushed out to fit a hardware schedule, that would show an ascent rather than a slide."

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by theluggage on Tuesday January 20 2015, @01:55PM

    by theluggage (1797) on Tuesday January 20 2015, @01:55PM (#136337)

    "having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality."

    And therein lies the problem. Even if Apple could keep up with it, its a strain for third party developers and even "serious" SOHO or self-employed professionals, let alone larger businesses supporting Mac users.

    (Eeeh, when I were a lad I remember spending t' thick end of a year preparing to upgrade a VAXCluster from VMS 4 to 5... now get orf my lawn!)

    What is the justification for major new OSX and iOS releases every year? Even mobile OSs have been around for 7-8 years now and should be reaching maturity, and OS X grew up with Snow Leopard. Its not like there's a flood of completely new computer usage paradigms coming down the pike and if you need to (e.g.) update (and break!) the wifi drivers in order to add support for 5K displays then there's something horribly wrong with the structure of the OS: it ought to be possible to upgrade drivers and subsystems as and when they are needed, and ready.

    ...and pushing an alert to every Loo-less cluser exhorting them to upgrade to version X.0 of the OS on day 1 is just frothing insanity.

    Its not just Apple - even Linux distros (who you'd think should be less driven by commercial pressures) seem to think we need a new alliterative animal every 6 months.

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20 2015, @02:51PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20 2015, @02:51PM (#136377)

    What is the justification for major new OSX and iOS releases every year?

    But Apple's Secret Sauce isn't that it works anymore... Since the iPod it has been that it is *Cool.* If you don't have the Latest, you aren't cool, and their economics is built on people throwing away their year old hardware. And that which is old is not cool, to the marketing world.

    QED

    • (Score: 2) by quacking duck on Tuesday January 20 2015, @03:35PM

      by quacking duck (1395) on Tuesday January 20 2015, @03:35PM (#136396)

      If by "throw away" you mean "sell or pass down" their year-old hardware.

      My mom has someone's twice-passed down iPhone 4. A friend was, until two months ago, using an *original* 2007 iPhone. Never had a case on it, never cracked the screen in almost 7 years. For people who don't care about the latest thing, the previous generations are just fine.

      You want true throwaway junk, look at the vast majority of Samsung's smartphone lineup. I know no one who has a passed-down S3 or S4, never mind the cheaper stuff, they all died and went to e-recyclers before they could go on to new owners.

      • (Score: 1) by Jesus_666 on Tuesday January 20 2015, @06:48PM

        by Jesus_666 (3044) on Tuesday January 20 2015, @06:48PM (#136458)
        Eugh. I bought my S3 because the specs looked good. Then the world found out about /dev/exynos-mem. And then there's the mess that is third-party firmwares (due to Samsung suddenly refusing to support external devs). And on some devices (like mine) the USB port becomes wonky within months, rendering it useless for data transfers. It's a nice phone apart from its aggravating flaws but it's still going to be the my Samsung phone for the time being.

        What is it with expensive smartphones and ridiculous manufacturing flaws?
      • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday January 21 2015, @05:03PM

        by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday January 21 2015, @05:03PM (#136753) Journal

        You want true throwaway junk, look at the vast majority of Samsung's smartphone lineup. I know no one who has a passed-down S3 or S4, never mind the cheaper stuff, they all died and went to e-recyclers before they could go on to new owners.

        Meh, my experience is the opposite.

        My father just bought an S3 about six months ago. He loves it. I've got an old S3 that I'm still using too -- cracked the screen a little while ago (unprotected six foot drop onto tile...), but it does make a *very* nice IP cam and file server. Also my backup phone should anything happen to my S5, as it does still work perfectly well, just a spiderweb across the front.

        My mother, on the other hand, is constantly telling me how much she regrets updating her iPad. Keeps running slower and slower each time. Last time I was home I had to switch her from Safari to Chrome because I couldn't get Safari to load a single website without crashing.

        Every Apple product I've ever bought is currently sitting in my scrap bin, and very few of them lasted more than three years. Most of them were repaired more than once during that time. Meanwhile I've got ten year old PCs and six year old phones from *other* manufacturers (Dell, Samsung, HP) still in daily use.

        • (Score: 2) by quacking duck on Thursday January 22 2015, @03:27PM

          by quacking duck (1395) on Thursday January 22 2015, @03:27PM (#136966)

          We're both offering mere anecdotes of course; naturally there must be some still using second-hand S3 and S4s even though I don't know any personally.

          I haven't trashed a single Apple product I bought (or bought by parents), going all the way back to the family's 1992 LC II, which still booted when I checked last year (it was used by me and then my younger siblings for probably 7 years). Original 2001 iPod still works though the battery is obviously pretty much gone after 13 years. Sold my 2006 Macbook in October. My 2009 iPhone 3GS was sold to a third owner 2 years ago... admittedly it wasn't doing well with the latest iOS update, Apple really shouldn't release updates for older devices if they compromise performance that much. My dad's just-replaced 2007 iMac still runs fine, and could technically be upgraded to the latest OS X for free.

          Meanwhile, the Thinkpad laptop I retained after my last company closed was "dead" after just 3 years. Technically a part can be replaced but after looking it up it's not worth the part cost or my time and effort.

          All this to say though, the AC's comment about "throwing away their year-old [Apple] hardware" is bullshit at best, because no one who plays the annual upgrade game throws it away, and many like me who *don't* do annual upgrades are working fine on hardware that's 2 or more years old.

          • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday January 22 2015, @03:40PM

            by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday January 22 2015, @03:40PM (#136970) Journal

            All this to say though, the AC's comment about "throwing away their year-old [Apple] hardware" is bullshit at best, because no one who plays the annual upgrade game throws it away, and many like me who *don't* do annual upgrades are working fine on hardware that's 2 or more years old.

            Very true, but I think there is some truth to the AC's comment as well. If only because every time Apple updates iOS, they push the same updates to even the oldest devices, and there's always a stream of complaints after every update that the older devices become too slow and can't handle the update. My experience with Android, on the other hand, is that after 2-3 years none of the updates will install anyway ;)

            Just compare the results of searching 'ios too slow after update' and 'android too slow after update'. What I'm seeing are the iOS results are all about the OS itself, where the Android ones are largely about specific apps. I think Apple gets too eager with the eye-candy sometimes. Although, yes, the other part of that is that Android devices vary too much which means it's a lot more effort for manufacturers to backport updates to older devices. So they just don't. But sometimes that's actually better.

            • (Score: 2) by quacking duck on Thursday January 22 2015, @09:58PM

              by quacking duck (1395) on Thursday January 22 2015, @09:58PM (#137062)

              We're pretty much in agreement there, I did say earlier that "Apple really shouldn't release updates for older devices if they compromise performance that much."

              Apple targets iOS updates to be installable on devices 3 generations back, so 2014's iOS 8 can be installed onto 2011's iPhone 4S, and iOS 7 installs onto 2010's iPhone 4. There's always a slew of performance problems for the first couple months until the version x.1 release comes out, then it's often tolerable if not exactly acceptable.

              Where Apple definitely fails their customers is blocking the ability to roll back iOS on the oldest supported hardware, if the user wants to.